R&D: Newsletter in 2021

At Appliscale we respect knowledge sharing and are passionate about new technologies. One day we were thinking – why not share tech news in newsletter form? By that time we were often discussing interesting news in our chats and at Weekly Knowledge Sharing meetings, but it's impossible to keep track of everything.

Newsletters would allow us to gather articles over a period of time and send it to everyone in a convenient form. The idea felt like a completely natural process, so we quickly put it into life and got a lot of positive feedback from our colleagues.

We chose Mailchimp as our newsletters platform – it was important for us to work on one newsletter collaboratively. In addition, it allowed us to define the design we wanted and bring it to life ourselves.

Our company has many engineers working in completely different areas of IT and it would be impossible to gather all the interesting IT news at once. So we started developing our newsletter step by step. How did it all start? Read in the next section.

Newsletter development

Frontend section

No doubt frontend is one of the most dynamic areas of IT right now. New technologies and frameworks appear all the time, and existing systems change and evolve. In such an actively changing world people often need helpful articles, software release notes, cheat sheets, and many more.

Our first newsletters were all about the frontend. These first steps gave us a vision of what we want the newsletter to look like, what content we want to see in any other section (like backend/DevOps) in the future, and how we can make it even more enjoyable reading.

DevOps section

On the 1st of September, students started school again and we have launched a new section in our newsletter – DevOps. It features interesting picks from the cloud, observability, automation, IaC, CI/CD, and VCS areas. In this section, subscribers can also find some information about the most recent and hot releases.

Business section

In Appliscale we believe in a holistic approach to doing business, hence we want our team to be well oriented not only in high-end technology but to be able to place it in the broader context. Keeping that in mind, in the 1st week of December we rolled out the business section. Our goal is to observe trends in the tech industry alongside the ones in local economic systems, global economics, social, and HR. We plan to share tips and hints regarding project management, Lean, Agile, and the future of work.

Bonus section

Sometimes there are links that we can't put in any section, but we definitely want to share them. Thus was born the most free and unpredictable bonus section. It includes literally anything like the results of annual surveys, advent calendars for programmers, news about hackathons, podcasts and much more.

Statistics

Feedback is a really important factor while starting new initiatives. Besides the comments received from our teammates, we are able to monitor the performance of our newsletter with Mailchimp’s campaign statistics. Thanks to that we are able to monitor such metrics as click rate, clicks per article, and… user location, which clearly presents the share of our colleagues working via VPN. We use that information to better adjust the content of our newsletter. Below you can find a short summary of our performance so far together with the newsletter's timeline.

Our timeline

Most popular articles

FrontEnd DevOps Bonus section

FE testing Container learning path StackOverflow survey

Our performance

Future plans

2021 was undoubtedly a good year for the newsletter project. We plan to grow our team and enrich the newsletter with new sections. Currently, we are about to collect colleagues' feedback about the sections they wish to show up in the newsletter. Additionally, there are rumors that the Appliscale newsletter might become public in 2022… Stay tuned!

We hope the topics discussed here will match your interests and are valuable to you. If you would like to work on similar challenges as our colleagues, we are actively hiring. Feel free to check our career page.

slot1